The real Marlboro man died in Wyoming last month. Darrell Winfield, who modeled for the brand from 1968 to 1989, was the ideal poster child for the rugged, independent self-image Philip Morris wanted to sell its customers.* He was so perfect that when Draper Daniels (the inspiration for Mad Men's Don Draper), then-creative director of Leo Burnett Worldwide—the agency contracted to create the campaign—found Winfield on the Quarter Circle 5 Ranch he said, “I had seen cowboys, but I had never seen one that just really, like—he sort of scared the hell out of me.”

Born in eastern Oklahoma shortly before the Great Crash of 1929, Winfield soon migrated West with his family in the devastation of the Dust Bowl. As an adult, Winfield and his wife settled in the ochre, sloping prairie of Pinedale, Wyoming—not far from the border sign that welcomes visitors with the slogan “Forever West,” a proclamation as fanciful as “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.”

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Though there were dozens of Marlboro men over the years, the campaign recruits preceding Winfield were typically screen actors and professional models. Winfield was the real deal. He continued working on ranches well into his modeling career, eventually using his Philip Morris checks to move his family onto their own ranch in Riverton where they’ve lived ever since. And yet, an obituary in The Economist reflected on the non-domestic masculine fantasy that images like Winfield’s expressed: “No family tied the Marlboro Man down. He had no home, though he was once in a ramshackle shed, holding his tin cup out roughly for coffee… He epitomised resilience, self-sufficiency, independence and free enterprise.”

While nary a tobacco TV ad has aired since 1970, some might remember the moving image of a man on horseback, cloaked in a duster, charging across the snow-dusted prairie to that woodstove-heated shed, scenes that ended with the optimistic uptick of a violin. The print ads featured groups of chisel-faced wranglers sitting around a campfire, or a solo cowboy astride a horse, cupping his smoke against the bitter winds somewhere in the red rock deserts and high plains of an ambiguous American West.***

Within a year of Marlboro Man's debut, the company went from holding only one percent market share to being the fourth bestselling brand in America.

The Marlboro Man is the most powerful mascot in American tobacco marketing in history. Since 1972, Marlboro has been the most purchased cigarette brand in the U.S., with sales today of over $23 billion worldwide. But modern cowboys, it turned out, are by and large fictive. Most ranchers don’t smoke tobacco, but rather chew it—smoking a cigarette is physically intrusive if your day is occupied by continuous manual labor. In places like Wyoming, Winfield's resting place, the image of the white, adventuresome cowboy in chaps and kerchief, duking it out with Indians alone on the frontier, was cultivated by 19th Century Wild West Shows and used, in part, to entice eastern settlers—and since the early 20th century, ranching has fallen far behind the state's actual economic boon: energy extraction.

Prior to the cowboy campaign, Marlboro was considered a “women’s” cigarette. Their debut slogan in 1924 was “Mild As May.” Early ads presented black-and-white sketches of listless flappers, slouched over an ashtray at a bistro table—or a sultry profile of a Gibson girl whose dark lipstick remained unblemished after a drag. It wasn’t until the 1950s that, as a Stanford study put it, the brand underwent a “sex change.”

Until the late 1960s, all filtered cigarettes—Marlboro included—were considered feminine. Part of Marlboro's campaign mission, according to scholar Katherine West, was to convince male consumers that the filter did not change the (as one ad put it) “man-sized taste of honest tobacco.” While they originally concocted a campaign that presented a variety of macho archetypes, dubbed “the Tattooed Man”—construction workers, mechanics, Navy officers, weightlifters, all bearing a black hand tat suggesting a heroic though dissolute past—the cowboy was so successful that they soon abandoned the series and devoted all their energy to that single image of masculinity on the frontier.

Within a year of Marlboro Man's debut, the company went from holding only a one percent market share to being the fourth bestselling brand in America. America loved Marlboros: Sales hit $5 billion in 1955, an over 3000 percent increase over 1954—the year prior to the Marlboro Man campaign.

Prior to the Marlboro Man, cigarette branding centered more on the practical benefits of a cigarette—“Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” “More doctors smoke Camels,” and Marlboro’s early “Ivory tip protects your lips.” What the Marlboro Man campaign displays was a trend we still see in lifestyle branding today: the image of a person who the consumer aspires to be like, or already imagines he is—or in many cases, she.

“Right now the most popular brand among women is Marlboro,” says Pamela Ling, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. “So even though you think of feminine brands [like] Virginia Slims and Capri and Misty, they’re actually a quite small market share.”

Philip Morris ultimately found that all the categories of “new young adult female smokers” smoked Marlboro more than any other brand.

Fourteen years after masculinizing Marlboro, Philip Morris introduced the first brand that used the same kind of aspirational advertising specifically to women: Virginia Slims. But the marketing ploy didn't work the same way on female audiences, and thus during the early-90s recession Philip Morris contracted a series of "lifestyle analysis" studies in 1993 that sought to taxonomize the values of the “new young adult female smoker.”

“They recognized that you have one group that [they] called the 90s Traditionalists,” says Ling, “who are married and they’re bargain hunters. They’ll drive across town to use a coupon and they’re really into their family; but they will express their opinion if they disagree with a man. That was one group. There’s another group they called the Uptown Girls, which like to party and shop and really want to be on the cutting edge of fashion and go out to bars, and meet hot guys…” There were also the Wallflowers, who, in the official report are described, among other things, as “not cool/hip” and “not tough/rugged.”

And then there was another group, says Ling, that “they called the Mavericks, which are women who smoke Marlboro. These are women who are not into the feminine image. They are not interested in Virginia Slims or Capri or Misty. They are the women who smoke "the man’s cigarette." They’re very independent, don’t like to be told what to do, very pro-smoking…” The Philip Morris report also says that Mavericks “strongly value financial and personal independence” and are primarily “single, white, and employed part-time.”

But beyond their kitschy categories, Philip Morris ultimately found that all the categories of “new young adult female smokers” smoked Marlboro more than any other brand—and in most cases nearly ten times more than targeted brands like Virginia Slims. It would seem that the Marlboro Man struck a chord across even gender lines. Or maybe it had the ring of an earlier gendered message, one that was targeted to women.

Shortly before the brand’s 1924 introduction, there were still massive restrictions on where and how American women could smoke. While some of those restrictions were only tacitly held beliefs, it was only in 1908 that a woman was arrested in New York City for smoking in public. But it was also in New York City that Ed Bernays unleashed his enduring 1929 media stunt on an Easter Sunday Parade: He paid debutantes to march down Broadway and smoke their “Torches of Freedom!” Even feminist activist Ruth Hale got behind this stunt. “Women / Light another torch of freedom / Fight another sex taboo!”

“Individualism is a core value of American society,” says Ling, “and the whole idea that, ‘I can do this because it's legal and I choose to,’ is very much in line with many American beliefs. Saying that, ‘I choose to smoke, and it’s an expression of my freedom,’ is something that, again, the companies have worked for a long time to reinforce, and it’s something that they know has resonance."

Ling thinks that this framing is clever beyond just appealing to America's individualistic culture: "It also shields [the tobacco companies] from litigation because, if you started smoking because it was your choice, then if you get lung cancer it’s your fault. That’s a very different frame from, ‘There is a predatory industry that has manipulated your psychology to get you at a vulnerable time to start using an addictive product that you’ll then be unable to stop using, and they should be held responsible for that activity.’”

The brand is full of paradox. Cowboys don’t smoke cigarettes.

The marketing team at Philip Morris USA declined to comment for this article due to company policy that prohibits their discussion of marketing materials, campaigns, and demographic data—which have all been by and large declassified since the 1998 Master Settlement, and organized in public archives like the Legacy Tobacco Archive at UCSF. It would seem that Big Tobacco isn't ready to reflect on the past, even as smoking dips to historic lows.

On the eve of the Master Settlement—after the dust had settled around the Joe Camel scandals and the leaked insider documents that proved big tobacco was intentionally marketing to kids—Charles Leroux wrote in the Chicago Tribune about the imminent evisceration of the Marlboro Man from U.S. advertising: “That fascination [with the cowboy imagery] persists almost the way smoking persists in this country—in denial of the evidence, in the distinctly American belief in an Out There where an untenable position can somehow become a trail to a happy ending.”

The brand is full of paradox. Cowboys don’t smoke cigarettes. And the rodeo, that perceived re-enactment of white masculinity and the spiritual home of the Marlboro Man, finds its early antecedent in Indian equestrian activities. And more women smoke Marlboro than any other brand.So in spite of Phillip Morris’ attempt to create advertising that appealed to men, they ended up drawing in women, too—which means that the Marlboro Man campaign wasn’t about being a man after all: it was about being American—and maybe more specifically, a white American.

When Darrell Winfield died last month, he was still living on his ranch in Riverton—a municipality which actually sits within the Wind River Reservation on land that was ceded from Northern Arapahoe and Eastern Shoshone people in 1906.** And what’s more is that Winfield, a white American, actually practiced Plains Indian spirituality, maintaining a sweat lodge on his property where, his local obituary reports, all were welcomed. And he continued smoking Marlboro to his dying day, on a sovereign piece of land belonging to peoples whose ancestors cultivated tobacco in the first place.

* This article originally stated that Darrell Winfield modeled for Marlboro until 1987, rather than 1989. We regret the error. ** This article has been updated to clarify the way Winfield's Marlboro Man was portrayed and where his ranch is located.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.